headspacehttps://bluesofnine.com
by MMiranda
Sun, 17 Feb 2019 22:35:31 +0000 en
hourly
1 http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cd8a89e93388c06ccf99d3666ef1c29d?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs0.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngheadspacehttps://bluesofnine.com
Five days and counting: migraines + vertigo. How do I feel?https://bluesofnine.com/2018/11/09/five-days-and-counting-migraines-vertigo-how-do-i-feel/
https://bluesofnine.com/2018/11/09/five-days-and-counting-migraines-vertigo-how-do-i-feel/#respondFri, 09 Nov 2018 14:39:37 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=2346
]]>https://bluesofnine.com/2018/11/09/five-days-and-counting-migraines-vertigo-how-do-i-feel/feed/0mem13“How’s the new job?”https://bluesofnine.com/2018/10/30/hows-the-new-job/
https://bluesofnine.com/2018/10/30/hows-the-new-job/#respondTue, 30 Oct 2018 17:32:44 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=2340In the letter I received in August confirming my appointment, I was told I’d be provided an office, a computer and a printer.

I started in a temporary office and was told I’d move into the new one in mid-September.

I received an email saying I could move into the new office at the end of October.

I received a new desktop and printer in September.

The printer stopped working almost immediately.

I was told the printer I was given was a mistake, and that the school no longer uses those kinds of printers, and that I could change the permission settings on the desktop to print using the department’s two printers. The permission settings have never worked.

The desktop stopped working shortly thereafter.

In my old office I had to wear my winter coat and hat while meeting with students because it was so cold.

The new office is like working in a pizza oven.

The new office is in a trailer on the outskirts of campus.

There is no printer in the trailer. Not individual printers nor a central printer.

There is nowhere to store or heat food in the trailer.

When I emailed to ask when we’d be able to store or heat food in the trailer, I was told the new job does not provide refrigerators or microwaves for such units by someone who is provided with refrigerators and a microwave.

My old office has access to refrigerators and a microwave, but I must leave there so I can work in a pizza oven with no printer, no refrigerator and no microwave.

The trailer bathroom doesn’t have a hand dryer and the paper towel dispenser is empty.

I hope to one day learn what the new job feels it is its job to provide.

]]>https://bluesofnine.com/2018/10/30/hows-the-new-job/feed/0mem13Fiat luxhttps://bluesofnine.com/2018/10/28/fiat-lux/
https://bluesofnine.com/2018/10/28/fiat-lux/#respondSun, 28 Oct 2018 15:42:44 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=2337Today Jacobin published “Against the Salary Cap” online, a piece I wrote on why — spoiler — I am against the NBA’s salary cap. You can read it here:

In eighth grade, maybe one Saturday a month, my friend’s mom would drive us into the city of Rochester to a store called Comics Etc. There I’d find one of my first speculative fiction loves, a monthly comic called What If? that tweaked some event from Marvel’s past and explored the consequences, e.g. “What if Kraven the Hunter killed Spider-Man?” (spoiler: Spidey’s girlfriend was sad), “What if the Hulk killed Wolverine?” (spoiler: Wolverine’s friends were sad), and “What if Captain America led an army of super soldiers in WWII?” (spoiler: Nazis used the ballot box to take over the U.S. Hmm….)

In retrospect it sounds like a one-note tune, i.e. “What if a character too commercially profitable to ever kill off actually died?”, but at 12 I fell in love with the concept. The Choose Your Own Adventure books had been some of my favorites as a child. The tales we love as children become the ghosts that haunt us the rest of our lives. What If? was a gift: here were adults who could write and draw showcasing the far reaches of the imagination. I was hooked.

For a kid whose curiosities and relationship with the unknown and the ineffable often ran into tensions with their family’s relationship with the Bible and church, reading about heroes and villains who could do the impossible, all the while saddled with relatable human weaknesses and struggles, approximated the kinds of questions and thinking that weren’t usually welcome in Sunday School. I wanted to understand the stories I learned in church, but the parts that seemed the most meaningful were often frustratingly unaddressed. I wanted to know the divine in the human and the human in the divine, because the greatest mysteries I could fathom were God and me.

I’d learned there was, before humanity existed, a great war in heaven, where Lucifer convinces a third of the angels to join his rebellion against God. But there’s no Biblical account of the war itself, nor any insight as to why the second-most wise and powerful creature in the universe and a good chunk of heaven’s denizens would start a fight they couldn’t possibly win. What had they wanted? What tipping point turned so many against all they’d ever known? Whenever I’d ask, I’d get “He was jealous of God’s greatness” or “It was all part of God’s ultimate plan” or “Why don’t you read something besides Revelation?” It felt deeply, personally important to understand the stories behind where everything started. Otherwise, how could anyone know what to make of the now? Or the end?

***

Late last summer my department head informed me I would lose my job come May of 2018. It was the usual narrative: budget problems; higher-ups; numbers game; nothing personal. You understand. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter anyway.

I was one of three lecturers getting canned, the three most recently promoted. I took the news well, I was told. I remember saying the right things but feeling like a character I once read in a comic, who had something bad happen, and they’re telling someone else that their head has split into two voices and one keeps saying normal respectable things and the other keeps screaming “aaaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeee!” without pause.

I was teaching a personal essay class I was really excited about; after the bad news came in, I poured myself into the work. I wanted to be distracted from losing my job, but I also felt stained by losing it for reasons that had nothing to do with my performance. A bureaucracy had ripped away my sense of peace. I wanted to be distracted by something pure. Talking about personal essays with a room full of students who were there by choice, after years of always working with students required to take an entry-level class, was like manna from heaven. I was surrounded by students’ stories whose endings were unwritten. As I had no idea what to make of my life, there was comfort working with people trying to figure out their stories, too.

My department head and some other angels in my program fought to try and save my job. A number of students, current and former, wrote and signed a petition to try and save my job; I later learned this did not please the higher-ups, but I was too proud of my kids applying so many of the persuasive techniques we talk about in class to give a shit what some faceless suits somewhere thought. I continued to give everything that I could to my teaching. But my feelings began to change. Months later, a reprieve: I was told my job would survive at least one more year. A small, grateful part of me felt some relief. Mostly, though, my feelings kept changing.

In January dozens of adjuncts were fired from my program. I felt survivor’s guilt having my job saved while all these caring, qualified people were fired for the same selective illogic that had put my position on the chopping block. I didn’t feel comfortable feeling relief, not only because others hadn’t been so fortunate, but because how could I trust the institution anymore? They’d already made it clear before firing all the adjuncts that my position was tenuous. What if some new budgetary shortage emerged? They’d fire me again without blinking.

There are two hallways that lead to my office. One passes the offices of the people I work with; one passes the offices of strangers in a different department. More and more I found myself taking the latter. Not because I had any personal beef with my co-workers, all of whom I’m cool to super-cool with. I no longer felt like I was on the ground floor of a long-term career alongside peers I could trust to be part of my life for a spell. Even though my job was salvaged, I didn’t feel like I belonged anymore. I felt like a rat whose home was destroyed by a flood, who watched many other rats drown, and who was sitting in the same hole in the wall as before, on edge waiting for the water to start seeping in again.

***

In eighth grade Marvel published Jim Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet.

The comics I’d read before Starlin had just enough philosophy and religious parallels to hold my interest. The Infinity Gauntlet blew the floodgates open. Here was a story whose characters spoke mostly calmly about becoming God, being God, overthrowing God, etc. Their motives differed, but mon Dieu! They had motives!

Thanos wants to be God because that’s the only way he’ll feel worthy of deserving the woman he loves, who happens to be Death — not the cute goth Neil Gaiman Death. Thanos’s Death never spoke.

The character Thanos seeks to usurp, Eternity, is used to being God, so he’s a bit touchy about someone trying to replace him. Thanos’s granddaughter, Nebula, wants to be God because she wants revenge against Thanos for torturing her. Dr. Doom wants to be God because Dr. Doom wants to be God, period. And the one character in the series who wants nothing more than to spend existence at peace, meditating on top of a mountain, sharing an entire world with just a handful of friends, otherwise blissfully cut off from the rest of the universe? That’s who ends up God. Natch.

***

For about eight months, I felt paralyzed by stress and anxiety. A few months ago I had a panic attack for the first time. It wasn’t any fun at all. Even more difficult than dealing with anxiety? What’s always been hardest for me: dealing with anger.

I’m angry someone with no awareness or regard for my existence signed a form or checked a box that made my job expendable. I’m angry so many caring, talented people lost their jobs for the same capricious reason. I’m angry that even though my job seems temporarily safe, I can’t trust anyone who says so. Mostly, I’m angry that thirtysomething years of rationalizing why my anger is generally unjustified has rendered me somewhat emotionally self-handicapped. So much of my worldview and understanding of myself is reliant on the idea that I’m so super-easygoing. I am pretty chill, but not as much as I like to think I am.

I’m hearing and learning more and more about so many men whose first response to anger is to disappear with it. To walk off, or run off, or sneak off, and to try and wrangle it and process it on their own, in private, and only after feeling like they have it corralled are they comfortable sharing their emotional process & conclusions in front of others. When my dad used to get upset, he’d go running. Miles and miles, hours at a time. I never consciously considered adopting this response, but you know what they say about how far apples fall from trees.

The person who hurt me the most as a child is someone I blocked out of my memories for many years; I didn’t know them personally and never knew their name; there’s no way to confront them. There never was. So I let it go. Like most people, there were formative pains that came from family drama, but I love my family. They’re some of the best people I know (yes, I’m biased, but also I’m right). Even though we hurt each other sometimes, I know we love and value each other. No point getting angry about people who love you and have sometimes unwittingly hurt you. So I let it go. Friends and lovers have taken advantage of me, but c’est la vie, right? So I let it go. I lost my job for reasons I couldn’t control, got it back for reasons I couldn’t control, and could lose it again tomorrow for reasons I can’t control. So I let it go.

There’s a moment in the third issue of The Infinity Gauntlet when Adam Warlock, who’s leading Earth’s heroes against Thanos, is looking for Wolverine shortly before the battle begins. Someone mentions they saw Wolverine headed for the rooftop of Avengers’ headquarters for a smoke, where the Hulk happened to be hanging out. Wolverine and the Hulk had a long, bloody history of conflict.

But on this occasion, they bond over their shared reputations as monsters.

Warlock finds them and tells them they’re the only two heroes whose morality concerning death means he can trust telling them being OK with killing Thanos. As Warlock walks away, the Hulk asks if Adam isn’t something of a monster, too.

“We are what circumstances make of us,” Warlock says.

***

At the end of Starlin’s story, Thanos is defeated, and Warlock now possesses the gauntlet, giving him mastery of time, space, reality, power, the mind and the soul. He already has plans for improving the universe, but Thor, Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer don’t trust him anymore.

“That power corrupts is a truism that cannot be ignored,” Dr. Strange warns.

“Already, the distance between what I was and am is insurmountable,” Warlock answers. “Like an ant contemplating the cosmos.”

***

I was never a big fan of the Avengers. In the Marvel universe literally everyone who isn’t a mutant or a member of the Richards family is a freaking Avenger. When the film The Dark Knight came out, I considered it the pinnacle of superhero cinema. The Avengers movie felt to me like a money grab. A few friends saw it and raved, but I was still non-plussed (I’m not sure anyone anywhere has ever been “plussed”). Then I heard the credits featured a glimpse of Thanos. I was sold.

14 films later (I saw the first Thor and Captain America films after The Avengers, though they came out the year before), the dream 12-year-old me never would have believed could come true opened in theaters across the country. I bought a ticket a month before it came out, something I’ve never done before. I asked my fiancee if she wanted to come, and initially she said no. But I hadn’t ever explained to her how important this story is to me, part of a larger relationship issue I’m working on where I’m often so internally focused I just don’t say a lot. I’m used to it, but I’m learning it’s not at all helpful for my partner to try and guess what, if anything, I’m feeling. So eventually I did tell her, and she saw it with me.

[NO SPOILERS AHEAD, BUT IF YOU LIKE TO GO IN TO A FILM FRESH MAYBE NOW’S A GOOD TIME TO TAKE A WALK OR CALL YOUR MOM OR SOMETHING]

The Avengers are the stars of the movie; in the original story, it’s a hodge-podge of Avengers, X-Men, aliens and cosmic beings. In the comic, Thanos kills half the universe because Mistress Death told him to; in the film he’s more like a radical undergrad Malthusian, all brutal pragmatism focused entirely on the forest with no regard for the trees. He doesn’t kill people because they specifically deserve to die. Like the faceless suits who fire people making far less money than the suits, it’s strictly business. Higher-ups. Numbers game. Nothing personal. You understand. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter anyway.

***

[OKAY, DEFINITELY A SPOILER COMING UP NEXT]

There are a few genuinely moving moments in the movie. For me, the most emotional is near the end, when a certain teenage web-head being played by his third actor this century realizes he’s going to die.

A LOT of people die in this movie, at least one of whom meant more to me than even Spider-Man. But Spidey’s death was the saddest, probably because I saw it as Peter Parker’s death. Parker is a young man, just beginning the time of life that is or at least feels self-directed. And then, just like that, it’s gone.

When I was young, violence and death in movies meant very little to me. I prided myself on being too cool to be bothered by virtually anything. A couple of weeks ago my fiancee and I started watching Hostel, which she’s seen before but I hadn’t. I knew pretty early on it wasn’t my cup of tea. I think I quit trying after 30-40 minutes. Yet only yesterday, we watched Logan together, which features more sheer volume of violence, some committed by and against young children. My fiancee seemed sickened by it. Didn’t faze me at all. Why do some violent acts sting so badly while others feel muted? Why does it change over time?

I wonder if it’s because when you’re young so much of your life is ahead of you, mostly unknown, so dreams are, proportionately, a bigger part of your life. Because most of your life is (seemingly) ahead of you, and most of that is, at the moment, dreams. They’re so abundant they’re cheapened. When I was 14, I wanted to be an NBA player. By 16, I wanted to be a film composer. The basketball dream was easy to let go, because there were infinite dreams to take its place.

When you’re nearing 40, odds are most of your life is behind you. Time and space erode so many of your dreams; you change; your priorities do, too. My body grows older, and changes; my mind sharpens in some areas and softens in others. But the dreams I cling to — of publishing a book; of being a good father and provider; of the Knicks someday not sucking; of politicians and businesspeople the world over receiving justice for their endless criminality — have survived mostly intact over my 14,000+ days on this Earth.

We’re trying to figure out where we’re going to live in a month. Do we stay where we are another year, and try to plan life? Do we move now, and figure things out along the way? It’s scary to think of moving again. A few years ago, I had to move five times in 10 months, covering almost 1000 miles. What’s scarier than that? Learning how much I still need to grow to be the kind of partner I want to be. Still trying to understand life, it seems. The questions change, but the source of all questions is constant.

I choose to believe that the universe unfolds as it must, which as apples go doesn’t seem to have fallen very far from “It’s all part of God’s ultimate plan.” But as The Infinity Gauntlet comic and Infinity War film demonstrate, even the divine’s motivations are subject to change. I can’t know what’s been behind my life’s path anymore than any character being written can know theirs. So the present and the future remain equally unknowable, too. I’m still trying to understand God and me. This time, though, the one I’m struggling to get answers from isn’t them. It’s me. Ant, meet cosmos.

]]>https://bluesofnine.com/2018/05/27/my-infinity-war/feed/0mem13avengers____infinity_war_by_themadbutcher-dbo60d811-19-08Infinity-Gauntlet-by-Jim-Starlin-1306917_1024x1024tl279a54b2307b0bb6e114f2e260570131d3fBxO_U1JWY-v44Y0XFiRVMs9gUzvuoKIXZ6XvS_FI7N1otkBeing laid offhttps://bluesofnine.com/2017/09/22/on-being-laid-off/
https://bluesofnine.com/2017/09/22/on-being-laid-off/#commentsFri, 22 Sep 2017 13:20:24 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=2227My department head emailed me a week ago to set up a meeting. He’s the third department head I’ve worked under at my current job, but the first to ever request a meeting. We agreed to meet Monday. I wondered what the meeting was about. Three thoughts ran through my mind:

I forgot to include some required information on one of my syllabi; perhaps he wanted to let me know in-person such slovenly behavior was unacceptable or even legally precarious. My boss has a military background, so I could imagine him being very attention-to-detail.

We’ve never really spoken much, despite working in the same department for five years. From his social media posts, it’s evident he’s a curious, open-minded dude with a potentially robust sense of humor. Maybe he wanted to have a brief chat and get to know me better, man-to-man.

I was getting laid off.

I spent the weekend rationalizing why it wasn’t the third idea, rationalizing why even if it was the worst-case scenario, why that really wasn’t such a big deal. I exhausted all the logical possibilities and spent some time in the mushier world of my emotions, a realm I have an attraction/repulsion relationship with. I got to work Monday and looked for my new boss in the big office the old bosses had used while in power. He wasn’t there; he still resided in his smaller, humbler stomping grounds. This seemed a good omen. I reached his office. He welcomed me in. As soon as I sat, he got up and closed the door. I knew then what he announced moments later. Bad news. You’re being laid off.

I prefer British English to American English. Listen to a soccer game with U.K. broadcasters and you may, too. Their English is more elegant, more eloquent. It’s like they’re speaking in cursive while Americans are still talking in print. For example, we say “laid off” to mean “fired.” Which is odd, as the expression “lay off” someone usually means to “leave them alone.” Leaving someone alone seems the opposite of stealing away what they love to do, and their paycheck, too. It’s the same thing as when head coaches or Trump cabinet members lose their jobs — they’ve been “relieved of their duties.” I’ve read numerous accounts of medieval executioners demonstrating astonishing courtesy toward a fellow human being, moments before chopping their head off.

There are two words I’ve heard the British use to describe being fired (which was a perfectly encapsulating term for the experience for years; the fact that it’s used less-and-less seems to me another canary in the coal mine warning us that if society’s a see-saw, the tilt is way too extreme toward the lawyers and CEOs these days). One of these words is “redundant.” This term is too modern for my tastes. It alludes to the sensibility of a world that has produced more food and medicine and technological marvels than it would need to bring all of humanity to a place of shared affluence, yet wastes this potential and accelerates an unsustainable vision that will kill most if not all of us off. Our world makes arbitrary, murderous distinctions every second of every day in determining which people or groups may flourish and which may suffer and die outside our scope of vision. All people are people, but some are more redundant than others.

The other word the Brits use is “sacked,” as in “I’ve been sacked.” A brutal, honest word from the older, brutal-er, honest-er world. When cities were sacked they were set upon by devastating external forces. Their way of life erupted into something unknown and unwanted. Their was no discussion to be had; the people could not talk to their invaders about how any of it made them feel. To be sacked was to be subjugated to violence without conscience or mercy, to be irrevocably impacted by an outside source. In the old world, the military leaders were often knee-deep in the chaos they created. Today, I’m waiting for a letter in the mail that will tell me my “appointment” is not being “renewed.” I suspect the signature at the bottom will come from a stamp.

***

When people ask how I’m feeling, I say I’m not really sure. That’s not because I’m unaware of how I’m feeling, but rather because how I’m feeling changes from hour to hour. At first I felt very little, and what I did feel was similar to the smile you feel forming when you play Powerball on a lark and the first three numbers called match yours, only for the rest to be different. You 99% accept that you don’t live in the universe where you win Powerball, but for a brief moment you indulge in the sensation of letting yourself pretend. My employer is New York State. New York State is one of the great idiot bureaucracies in existence, run by some of the great idiots of our time. You can’t trust an idiot to not press the red button.

For a while I felt unjustified feeling upset at all. I have a job through May. This isn’t the real world, where people lose their jobs and have to clear their desk out the same day. Thank God for unions. I have a relatively soft landing, especially when there are others who will lose their job or their benefits right around Christmas. I felt I was being very First World with my feelings. Perhaps this was a subconscious sedative, an attempt to escape my emotions by logically denying my right or need for them.

But I couldn’t shake that I was feeling things. In some ways it felt like being dumped. Specifically, it reminded me of a breakup from grad school, one that cut so deeply because it had felt like this other person and I had created something so momentous, so connective, that it was like a third party in the relationship, an invisible child, sort of. Then one day someone decides they’re out, and that’s it. But that’s not it. Because that kills off the third, too. That thing that only existed between you can’t survive the split. And the worst part is the only other person who might share that pain and mourn its loss is the one who’s killing it.

Today I suspect the challenge is not figuring out which emotion is the one I should feel, or even do feel, but to digest all of them together. I am losing my job because somewhere out there a bureaucrat who isn’t a slave to student loan debt is playing with numbers, in a room I’m confident is rather dimly lit, both literally and figuratively. I’m not losing my job because of the quality of the work I do. This makes the sacking explicitly impersonal, which consequently makes it seem existentially, conspiratorially personal.

Colin Kaepernick is unemployed. Dick Cheney is still collecting paychecks in his blood-soaked, sulfur-stinking talons. I’m in good company.

I am in Kentucky. Visiting future in-laws. Time being what we will of it, I do not wish to call them “future” in-laws. The future is “then,” and they do not feel like “then,” and no one knows what then will or won’t be. This is now, and they feel like now, which feels like this.

So. I am in Kentucky. Visiting in-laws. Seen and heard birds and accents and people I’ve never known before. Shopped at a 24-hour Wal-Mart. Been bitten for the first time in my life by a horsefly. Been bitten for the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time by a horsefly. Been to a supermarket with signs saying you must buy cigarettes in the checkout lanes and not at the service desk, the opposite of what signs say in NY. I’ve gone to a baseball game and scored a goal in a family soccer game and met more tennis players in a week than all the prior years of this life.

]]>https://bluesofnine.com/2017/06/25/summer/feed/0mem13Image result for timeSurvivor’s guilthttps://bluesofnine.com/2017/04/04/survivors-guilt/
https://bluesofnine.com/2017/04/04/survivors-guilt/#respondTue, 04 Apr 2017 14:02:18 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=21464+ years ago, I finished my creative writing MFA. For many days since, until maybe hopefully recently, I have struggled with guilt.

Since graduating, I entered a career that lets me talk about writing (which I like) and editing (which I love) with hundreds of people I would otherwise never have met from all across five continents. I get to share what I find interesting with roomfuls of (generally) open and willing humans. And I have struggled with guilt.

I’ve worked as an editor on fiction and non-fiction publications. I’ve sold book reviews and sports features. A half-dozen websites have “hired” me to write for them, and some of them even pay (poorly). I have been able to spend much of the past few years writing about sports that I care about, and even to spend most of that focus on the teams I care about and root for. And I have struggled with guilt.

15 years ago, after finishing my undergrad program, I narrowed down my career pursuits to three: law school, American studies, or writing. I got into law school and an AMS PhD program, which meant I might make a good amount of $$ down the road, or at least pay nothing while advancing my education and getting on track for a university job while incurring less student debt. Nope. I love writing and thinking about writing and talking about writing and writing about writing. So off I went.

The year I started the MFA, I’d contracted a bacterial lung infection. I lost 30 pounds in six weeks while my days became 24/7 sitting on a couch and coughing army-green phlegm into a cup. If I walked up a flight of stairs, I was out of breath like I’d run five miles. I didn’t have health care, so when my symptoms began I did what a lot of practical people without health care do: I didn’t go the doctor when I first experienced symptoms, because when you see the doctor too early they say “Probably viral. Rest. Hydrate.” You have to wait until the symptoms have just started to really come into their own, so the doc can tell you what’s going on and tell you how to fix it. In my case it took the doctors longer than usual to diagnose me; I was in the hospital the day of my cousin’s wedding hooked up to three machines when somebody finally figured out it wasn’t “probably viral.”

I was scared those six weeks. It was the first time I’d ever been sick where no one could identify what was wrong, and I just kept losing weight and getting weaker. When I started the MFA later that year, my goal was clear: get a job. Get health care someday. Never again find myself playing the wait-for-just-the-right-time-to-see-a-doctor game. I wanted a career in writing. I didn’t know or care what it would look like. I’d be happy as a writer, maybe for a newspaper. I’d be happy as an editor. I’d be happy as a professor. I’d be happy as a copywriter. Maybe ethical advertising, like for AdBusters or something. Whatever. All I cared about entering the MFA after completing a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a master’s of science curriculum was finding a job that would make me self-sufficient. And I did. And I have struggled with guilt since.

I’ve struggled so much, I think, because somewhere along the line of my MFA I confused my own dreams with someone else’s. No one specific. But you work closely with people who’ve published memoirs, and screenplays, and short story collections; you work with great newspaper columnists, with leading comic book creators, with clever people in giant houses who drink good wine in the Hamptons, and you’re close enough to taste it. And I was still dumb enough to think the lesson I’d been taught as a child of the 20th century mattered in the 21st — that working hard leads to stability, a roof over your head, a family you can support, a life you can feel ownership over.

I was published a few times while in the MFA. I always got good feedback on my work, yet decided to keep the big picture in mind, so whenever someone praised my writing it went in one ear and out the other. The criticisms: that’s what I cared about. I could literally hear 15 minutes of positive feedback and one complaint, and the complaint was what I remembered. Not in a depressing way. I figured this is what good writers do: be ye not tempted by a silver tongue. Keep your eyes on the prize (and the negative comments), your nose to the grindstone, your hands gripped tight around the sword in the stone, and every second of every day of your life, pull. Don’t you dare peek to see if the sword is moving. Have faith: if you pull it off, the roar of the crowd is all you’ll need to know.

I wanted to be every writer. I wanted to write a successful screenplay, magnificent short stories, an earth-shattering novel, and the greatest collections of memoirs by someone under 40 that no one had ever heard of. I made lists. I carved out slices of time when I wasn’t teaching or grading 4 or 5 classes per semester. I reached out to old friends and advisors, and found time apart had eroded bonds I assumed still stood strong; more likely, I had only glanced at the bonds in the past, fleetingly, and now that I was looking more closely I could see they’d never been what I’d imagined. Delusional thinking is great for fiction, not for real living. And I struggled with guilt. And compounding that guilt is this: what greater muse is there for any artist than struggling?

Yet I have not written that screenplay. Nor have I completed a short story collection. I’m on my third stab at a novel, which honestly means I failed twice before and now do a lot of thinking and note-jotting but haven’t actually sat down with it. No memoirs. This has been my great unending guilt. This was why I felt like a failure. If someone asked me “What have you written since graduating?” I’d have to say “Nothing.” Which would make me a dispassionate, talent-wasting, weak-spirited fake. People write in the most brutal, inhuman conditions. People with infinitely more difficult lives than me write every day. The fact that I haven’t written anything not only indicted me as a writer, but as a human being. All my struggling had done was break me.

Then I did some math.

In the past three years, I’ve written for Posting&Toasting, a site that covers the New York Knicks. In those three years, the stories I’ve published at P&T total about 140,000 words. That’s roughly the equivalent of a 400-page novel. I don’t think of it as “writing” because when I write about sports, it isn’t a struggle. It doesn’t feel like I’m ripping my soul through a fine mesh net. It doesn’t feel like work. I just like it. My job often doesn’t feel like work, either. It feels like performance art with a new audience every couple hours, then a completely new set and audience every few months. I like it. A lot. Except when I’m grading. Then it feels like this.

Maybe it’s an American thing, a Protestant thing, to think something isn’t worth enjoying if you haven’t struggled for it. I’m a failed Protestant and a C+ American at best. I like to like what I like. I still care about my fiction. It’s still an important part of me. I still have plans for it. I still have dreams. But for the first time in years, my dreams are mine again.

]]>https://bluesofnine.com/2017/03/06/what-is-this/feed/0mem13Unfold away, Universehttps://bluesofnine.com/2017/01/31/unfold-away-universe/
https://bluesofnine.com/2017/01/31/unfold-away-universe/#commentsTue, 31 Jan 2017 22:19:21 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=2008So far 2017 has not been my healthiest year to date. In fact, most of my loved ones seem to have been dealing with infections and bloodwork and tests since before Christmas. Generally I try to adopt a “Don’t worry until you have something concrete to worry about” attitude, because more generally I try to live by “The universe unfolds as it must; you can’t bend it; maybe bend you?”

The past couple weeks I’ve been waiting for more bloodwork while trying not to let the limited info from the last bloodwork I had done metastasize into bugging out. Imagination is often a useful thing, but sometimes it runs amok and is not so fun. Like when you get a call about your test results that goes:

THEM: So we have your test results.
ME: OK.
THEM: Yours are a little high.
ME: Yeah?
THEM: A normal reading would be somewhere in the range of 40 to 60.
ME: OK…
THEM: Your reading was 550.
ME: OK…
THEM: <click>

I’m selectively good with numbers but rubbish with science. When I hear normal is 40-60 and my number is normal multiplied by something between nine and 14, that doesn’t strike me as a “little” high. But I love to trust; it’s like my favorite thing. So I default to figuring the person on the phone must have said a “little” high because that’s true, and not because they’re a disembodied voice of a stranger I will never meet who owes me nothing in life and has no interest in this call beyond giving me legally required or at least legally courteous information and then hanging up so they can take a piss or flirt with their work friends or whatever it is disembodied stranger’s voices do when they’re not giving me ambiguous medical information that may or may not allude to a serious health problem.

That call was probably about two weeks ago. How’m I doing today?

I went to work this morning and felt off. Walking down the halls it was like the floor was inviting me to crumple in a pile and just lay there. I’ve never fainted, but I felt tired enough that I really thought I was just going to stop functioning…like my mind and body would just be all “Smell ya later” and clock out for the day. I’ve been wiped out all day.

Which brings me to Facebook.

It’s weird being home sick in 2017. Normally I tear through social media devouring any and all content that’s remotely interesting and sharing it, possibly ad nauseam considering how many of my “friends” are people I haven’t seen in 20+ years or former students who are used to me focusing on “Substantiate!” and appositives and periods-and-commas-go-inside-the-quotes-never-outside.

But — and I think this goes back to childhood — I feel guilty if I don’t look like I’m at death’s door when I’m home sick. Back in the day you could be home sick in the privacy of your non-internet world and no one knew how you were doing, unless they reached out with a phone call or in-person visit. You could stay home and lay in bed, or read, or watch TV without fear of judgment. But now, if you’re posting updates or sharing articles, I wonder if that behavior is so normalized that to engage in it in any way is to suggest self-normality. So like a jackass, I end up skulking around social media. I read things I find interesting but refuse to share them, lest I look like I’m living it up too much.

Today I found myself surrendering to a temptation I generally pass on, which is Facebook’s “People You May Know” page. If you’ve been in a coma for 10+ years, you may not know what this page is (also, you’ve awoken to a U.S. led by Donald Trump and a bunch of Nazis and Orwellian villains. RESIST!! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!). I don’t know how FB decides I might want to know someone; I already know mad folk on FB I wish I didn’t know. Why would I want more?

I saw a girl I simultaneously recognized and didn’t. It took me a few minutes to realize she was the first person I met for a date after a two-year relationship had ended. Our lives have apparently lapped over one another’s since then. We went to the same grad school program and have taught at the same university, so naturally we have know some of the same people, which is why FB thinks she’s someone I might know.

I remember the day we met, because I was teetering between nervousness and anxiety as I walked down the street to meet her at a park. It had been years since I went on a date (I also remember it well because there was another woman at the time who had interest in me, and she got royally pissed when she found out I’d met someone on a date. Later I’d find out this second pissed woman was sending naked pics of herself to someone she was more-than-dating at the same time she was feeling possessive of me). It was autumn, one of those wrong-yet-divine days that are far too warm for that time of year, so they’re crazy windy, as if the Earth itself is teetering between states of being, too. Twists and swirls of colorful leaves frenzied all around me.

I remember reminding myself as I walked down the street to never forget that moment: the excitement, the weather, the sensation of anything being possible. I knew whatever did or didn’t happen with this person, I would always be grateful for that afternoon, for what it meant to feel joy again, to feel possibility again; after a difficult summer of healing and betrayal and feeling the world shrink, to feel it breathing again, exhaling, expanding…I’ll never forget that.

I’ll also never forget how on that date, as we were discussing our shared love for writing, we talked about people and places we might have in common, and her bringing up the name of a guy I’ve never met but everyone around me seems to know, and her awkwardly assuring me, out of nowhere, “I’ve never slept with him.” It was, I thought, a strange thing to volunteer out of the blue. Turns out today they’re engaged and have children together.

Today I’m engaged and get to share a most astonishing child with the love of my life. I hope we have 50 years and grandchildren and great-grand children together. I suppose everyone gets the same deal. You get a lifetime. Change yourself as needed, and as much as possible, accept it for what it is. What you need will find you. The universe unfolds as it must. Also, if your job is to call strangers with the results of their bloodwork, SUBSTANTIATE! Give them some context, for God’s sake.

]]>https://bluesofnine.com/2017/01/31/unfold-away-universe/feed/1mem13Adagio brainhttps://bluesofnine.com/2017/01/19/adagio-brain/
https://bluesofnine.com/2017/01/19/adagio-brain/#respondThu, 19 Jan 2017 21:39:43 +0000http://bluesofnine.com/?p=1985I haven’t written on this site in over half a year. God and maybe Borges only know how many words I’ve written in that time, but none here. There’s been a lot of silence and confusion and pain and joy that, combined and viewed from afar, look a lot like life.

I don’t stop writing because there’s nothing to say. Usually it’s that there’s too much to say, and I generally feel overwhelmed from talking. Pro’ly nobody who knows me would suspect that, but it’s true. I like to gather my thoughts slowly and work them out carefully before I release them. The plus to typing my thoughts is it gets me out of that shell; it artificially inclines me to say more things. The minus is the longer I’m in a writing rhythm, a prestissimo, the more I I start trying to force myself into maintaining that thinking speed, to keep up. But my adagio brain doesn’t like that after a while, so I can only outrun the silence of myself for so long, for wherever I run, there I am.

Gonna try to write more now. That’ll probably mean shorter stuff, at least for a while. Got anything you want to see done on this site? Let me know. What’s new with you?